Tag Archives: observation

Several colleagues and I took a field trip last week to Bronx Community College (BCC), one of the other colleges in our university system, the City University of New York. The library at BCC recently moved into brand new digs in a freshly-constructed building, a rarity for colleges here in the space-challenged NYC metropolitan area. In the library at City Tech where I work, we’re thinking about space use and the possibility of renovations, so we were eager to see what BCC’s librarians and the architects who designed the building had done with the opportunity to build a library space literally from the ground up.

The new BCC library is gorgeous, and my colleagues and I came back to Brooklyn with lots of ideas to think on for our library at City Tech. Curiously, since then I’ve found myself not reflecting on what students are doing in a college library, which is usually the lens I use when I look at space use in our library. Instead, I’ve been considering how we librarians use and move through space in a library.

At City Tech, offices for librarians are located along the perimeter of the library and divided nearly evenly between both of our two floors. We have a few areas that include several offices that open into a shared space, but most of us are in individual spaces with doors that open into the library itself. Staff restrooms and our lounge/kitchen are on one end of the upper floor of the library, our conference room is on the other. My colleagues and I are, for the most part, split up — scattered throughout the library.

BCC’s new library features a different plan for librarian offices: there the offices are clumped together on the first of the library’s two floors. The office area is rectangular with librarian offices along the outside edge, presumably to take advantage of the incredible views that accompany BCC’s location in the University Heights section of the Bronx. The office area also includes staff cubicles (in the center of the space), restrooms, a conference room, and a kitchen/lounge. The librarians are all together, and the space is accessible from one corner of the public area of the library via a single door.

How does office configuration affect the ways that we interact with each other as librarians and with our students and other patrons in the library? Because we’re so spread out at City Tech, I can sometimes go days or even a week without seeing my colleagues who have offices on the other side and floor of the library from me. While of course we mingle in meetings, at the Reference Desk, and in other library-related functions, my colleagues and I often have to intentionally seek each other out to have the kind of casual conversations that were common when I used to work in an office that was all cubicles, the kinds of conversations that I imagine are a part of the daily routine at BCC where the librarians’ offices are all together. Those conversations can provide a social glue that fosters camaraderie and helps a group of people work together as a team.

While I may not see my colleagues as often as I would if our offices were grouped together, a benefit to having librarians spread out like we do at City Tech is that we have to walk through the library’s public areas throughout each day. Anytime I come and go from the library, use the restroom or microwave, or need to make a photocopy, I’m walking through our stacks and study areas. Since I can never really turn off my inner anthropologist, I find that I highly value the opportunity to observe students and other patrons as they use the library. In the best moments these observations can provide inspiration to try something new with our services and resources. And of course the insights they offer can also inform our thinking about renovation possibilities.

It seems like there’s a strong positive side to both lumping and splitting office spaces in the library, so I’m not certain that one layout is clearly better than the other. I wonder if there’s any configuration that would facilitate the advantages of both?